[gst-devel] youtube on gstreamer

[Sean McNamara]

On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 2:35 AM, ebin jose <ebinjosetel at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> Has anybody worked on playing back youtube videos on gstreamer ?

Playing Youtube SWF files from your own website, etc. is probably fine
(many sites embed Youtube SWFs), and really the only high road. If you
can get Gstreamer to do that, have at it, but I'm not sure which
codecs you'd need to have installed to do that, if indeed it's
possible at all. Your next best bet to play the SWFs would be Gnash
(which uses Gstreamer internally a lot).

However, there have been reports[1] that Youtube goes after (and tries
to shut down) people who directly download and stream their FLV or MP4
files. It's fairly easy to introspect the results of an HTTP GET
youtube.com/watch?id=foo and build a URL that will get you an FLV
(which plays in gstreamer with the correct codecs), but that may
violate Youtube's terms of service.

"Can do" versus "Should do" -- it's your call, the same with the ugly plugins.

[1]: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/13/youtube-kills-our-video-download-tool/

>
> I am new to youtube apis also.
>
> We have a portable media player (arm based) with wifi connectivity. We
> are planning to add an application which can playback youtube
> contents.
>
> Background:
> - Our player is running linux on an ARM based platform.
> - mediaplayer uses gstreamer as playback engine.
> - the complete code (apart from gstreamer) is in C.
>
> I have the following questions:
> 1) I am planning to use youtube DATA APIs (java ones) to retrieve the
> urls from different categories of videos in youtube;

I briefly investigated the data APIs myself, and I couldn't see how to
get URLs to actual video datastreams (the FLV or MP4 files). If it
isn't in Youtube's declared API, then it probably isn't something they
want you to do.

>
> I belive once I have the media url, I can just give it to gstreamer and it
> will play it back.

As stated above, if you're getting an .FLV or .MP4 file, it will
"work" in Gstreamer given the proper codecs (which are known to work
with the correct combination of gst-plugins-good|bad|ugly) but you
need to watch out for a potential TOS violation. If you're getting an
SWF file, then I would presume that Youtube is happy, as that's
basically encapsulation of their ad content and so forth, which is
exactly what they want.

> I believe this is a right way of doing it. Please comment if this
> belief is wrong ?
>
>
> Thanks in advance.
> Ebin.
>
>
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